Big History is a reference text for universities across the United
States and around the world. David
Christian ( D.Phil., Oxford University)
is a lecturer in history at Macquarie
University Sydney Australia. In 2010,
he founded the ‘Big History Project’
with Bill Gates. Cynthia Stokes Brown
(Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University)
has written extensively on civil rights
history. She is also the author of
Big History: From the Big Bang to
the Present (2007). Craig Benjamin
(Ph.D., Macquarie University) is
an Associate Professor of history
at Grand Valley State University in
Michigan.

These authors boast that “this is
the first modern text on big history”
(p. 4), and claim to have created a
new vision of the past that draws from
many different scientific disciplines
including history, geology, biology,
and cosmology. These alleged insights
in our understanding of the past have
occurred largely since the middle of
the 20th century, and partly as a result
of what they call the Chronometric
Revolution. At the centre of this
Chronometric Revolution is a series of
new techniques for dating past events.
Because historical studies traditionally
relied on written documentary
evidence, historical studies have
therefore been constrained to the
events of human history, so there is no
way of knowing events that happened
before the advent of humans.

These supposed new ways of
dating past events have allegedly
made it possible to assign ‘absolute
dates’ to events not mentioned in any
documents, including the origin of
life and origin of the universe. The
authors are speaking, of course,
about radiometric dating (including
carbon- 14 dating and uranium-lead
dating) in which they place great
faith and confidence—although even
scientists who are ardent defenders
of the accuracy of radiometric dating
would never claim that it produces
absolute dates.

The authors summarily dismiss the
notion of divine revelation, describing
it as merely “whispered words of
divine beings or inner voices” (p. 6).

What is big history?

The authors claim to have formulated a new secular and materialistic
origin story to replace religious
origin stories—especially the biblical
account of creation. To them, origin
stories such as the Genesis account are
“naive and simplistic” (p. 12), and the
miraculous birth and death of Christ
are dismissed as being merely great
stories with “almost magical power”
(p. 12). In fact, they assert that it is
a mistake to take origin stories such
as the Genesis account too literally,
and that those who told them did not
themselves always treat the stories as
the literal truth.

The authors assert that there isno objectively verifiable evidence tosupport the creationist view and noway of testing it. Therefore, scientistsregard supernatural creation as amatter of belief or as a metaphor.Instead, scientists look for naturalisticexplanations that can be supportedby objective evidence. The authorsseem blind to the fact that big bangcosmology and biological evolutionare mere forensic reconstructions thathave no direct evidence and there is noway of testing them.

Indeed, the authors describe big
history as an attempt “to reconstruct
the history of the whole of time …
based on the conclusions of modern
scientific scholarship” (p. 3). Big
history, then, is a modern, universal,
scientific, origin story.

The authors claim there is a single
thread that runs through the whole
story: the emergence of more and
more complex things over time. It
is clear from their statements that
they presuppose chemical evolution
operating in a materialistic universe.
Again, the authors claim that big
history is based on the best knowledge
available to us—in other words,
knowledge derived from modern
science. For them, modern science is
the dominant form of knowledge in
the modern world, because it is global
in its reach, and employs what they
believe is the rigorous use of carefully
tested evidence.

Big history and ‘science’

The authors follow the standard big
bang model as the modern scientific